


No-Passing Zone

by elle_stone



Series: Wild & Wonderful [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Autumn, F/M, Friends to Lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 17:16:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12113463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Bellamy looks mostly out the passenger's side window. It's disorienting not to be behind the wheel, but at least it gives his thoughts a chance to wander safely. He finds himself in a mental space not quite discrete and clear enough to be captured in words, where what if’s and maybe’s mix with unasked questions, and opportunities seem to open up like the sky behind the shifting of pure white clouds.For the prompt: Bellamy observing Clarke while she rants about how everyone is overtaking her when she goes the speed limit.





	No-Passing Zone

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: _Bellamy observing Clarke while she rants about how everyone is overtaking her when she goes the speed limit, Modern AU_ requested by thejonderettegirl. 
> 
> This fic takes place in the same universe as another story of mine, _Since There's No Place To Go_ , in which Bellamy and Clarke live in West Virginia c. 2009. _No Place_ takes place in December, and this fic takes places the previous October.
> 
> I learned how to drive in WV and the roads here are loosely based on the actual roads near my parents' house. Clarke's rants are basically my rants.

Bellamy has known Clarke Griffin for almost four months now and in that time she has become a remarkably close friend.

Last summer, he would have called her an acquaintance. They met in a poli sci class during the summer session at Arkadia Community, and even though they sat next to each other most days, and chatted sometimes before or after class, and even though he always looked forward to seeing her and after they exchanged numbers they'd text sometimes in the evening or at night, he still wouldn't have said they were terribly close.

Now that the fall semester has started, though, they've fallen into a routine and especially easy closeness, one that fills him with comforting security. They're in the same American History course, where they sit next to each other and pass occasionally snarky notes. After class on Tuesdays, when he doesn’t have work, they hang out in the student center or study together in the library. And most Saturdays, when Clarke's on shift at Kane's coffee shop downtown, Bellamy and Octavia stop in for hot chocolate and tea and one of those big black and white cookies, or a muffin, if there are any cranberry ones left. Bellamy has even invited Clarke over to his house a few times. This is not something he normally does. It’s not because he's ashamed of his little place—he's quite proud of it, this two-bedroom whose mortgage he pays all by himself, this little life he's built all by himself—but because he's not okay with just anyone catching sight of the guilty pleasure fantasy books he leaves out on his coffee table, or Octavia's blue butterfly backpack left squashed against the couch cushions for the night.

Clarke has become, overall, a soothing and constant presence in his life. She's burrowed her way into his life and into his thoughts. He feels at ease with her, in a way that is so unusual that it is, at first, difficult even to accept. He can't put a name to the warm feeling suffusing through his chest so he pretends it's just the crisp air of autumn and the way the trees have started to change colors and the pumpkins on sale at the Farmer's Market downtown, all of the signs of September shading into October like a bluster of wind blowing his whole life clean.

*

When his car breaks down, he manages a ride to the college with one of his neighbors, who's heading in that direction anyway, but in order to get home he has to rely on Clarke. Which isn’t bad, except for the asking her part. By now, though, she knows that he hates to ask for favors, so she heads him off with a suggestion of her own, partway between his explanation and request.

Somehow she manages to make, "I'll just give you a ride, then," sound like an order.

This should probably be annoying. But it isn't. It's weirdly endearing, like an unspoken secret passed between them. Then she gives a decisive nod of her head and shoots him a soft smile over the library table, and he forgets to sound gruff and reluctant when he agrees.

Her car, expensive and sleek, a remnant of her old life, looks startling and out of place in the parking lot. Hard to miss, even if he didn't already know it was hers. She's parked it under one of the trees in the corner of the lot, and gauzy autumn sunlight shades patterns of leaves on the hood: a rustling of light and dark each time the new season breezes past them. "I could definitely take an entire course just on the early atomic age," Clarke's saying as she unlocks the doors. "Like the late forties through the sixties. It feels so distant and so close at the same time."

"That's dark of you," Bellamy answers, but without judgement.

A small collection of library books is sitting on the passenger seat, along with a sketchbook and several CDs, but before he can read anything besides half the cover of the top book ( _An Introduction to Still Life—_ ), Clarke's shoved her head in and grabbed the whole stack from view.

"Sorry about that. And, wait, aren't you the person whose favorite period of history involves the masses gathering in arenas to watch people kill each other for sport?"

"Just that era’s reality TV, Clarke. We're no better; we just have cameras."

She rolls her eyes at that and slams shut her door. "I'm not even going to get into the false comparison that is 'scripted backstabbing and yelling' versus 'literally mauled by lions.'"

"Good,” he grins, “because you'd lose."

When he stretches his legs, his feet bump into a bright red ice scraper and a semi-crushed box of tissues, and he realizes that for all the times he's seen Clarke get into or out of this car, he's never actually driven anywhere with her before. She turns on the radio, then turns it down; it's tuned to the local nostalgia station and it's playing something poppy and upbeat from the late 90s: the sort of thing either of them might have listened to at a middle school dance.

As Clarke twists around to check for cars behind her (her hand on the back of his headrest, her arm almost in his personal bubble of space), he finds himself wondering if he would have asked her to dance to one of the slow songs, when they were both awkward, the wrong height, uncertain, when they were still growing into themselves. And he wonders if Clarke ever really had an awkward phase and what that might have looked like, and if Abby has any pictures she might someday share.

In the library, they'd been talking off and on about their professor and her habit of inserting her own views about the Cold War into class discussion. But now as Clarke turns onto the road out from the main campus entrance, their conversation turns to the weird scarecrow her neighbors have put up on their lawn. Bellamy hasn't been by recently enough to see it, so she describes it to him, making it sound like a terror straight out of her nightmares: frightful straw hair and buggy button eyes and a sewn-on mouth ready to scream out horrors. She talks about stealing it in the middle of the night and burying it. Bellamy suggests this would only lead to it clawing itself free and coming for revenge.

It's funny for a while, but somewhere around the official city limits, they get bored of it, and a companionable silence takes their former conversation's place. Clarke is the sort of person around whom quiet is no burden. He never feels like a bad host when she comes over and they sit on his couch together reading, side-by-side, never feels like an intruder when he visits her place and they share a bowl of popcorn and marathon TV shows, silent and engrossed for hours at a time. Just her presence nearby feels easy and right.

Clarke doesn't seem to mind the quiet either. She drives as if by rote and doesn't turn the radio up.

By the time the view out the windows turns to low-set houses, interspersed with wide lawns and blazing orange-red trees, and the shoulder narrows and finally disappears, and the speed limit slides up, they've long settled into a silence broken only by the nattering of the occasional commercial, or Clarke humming a few bars of a tune along with the radio. Bellamy looks mostly out the passenger's side window. It's disorienting not to be behind the wheel, but at least it gives his thoughts a chance to wander safely. He finds himself in a mental space not quite discrete and clear enough to be captured in words, where _what if’_ s and _maybe’_ s mix with unasked questions, and opportunities seem to open up like the sky behind the shifting of pure white clouds.

An optimism suffusing him.

“Oh—fuck!”

He slides his gaze over to his left, slowly, and raises his eyebrows, just in time to catch sight of Clarke slamming her open palm against the steering wheel. For a second, Bellamy has a distinct premonition of her suddenly flooring the gas just out of rage and spite. But she doesn’t. Instead she grabs the wheel with a white-knuckled grip and lets out a hard breath through flared nostrils. “Did you see that? Asshole just passed me. It’s still a thirty-five and look—” She gestures to her speedometer, then out the driver’s side window. “Thirty-five. And there are still houses out there. This is basically a residential area.”

It is—technically. And she’s not wrong that the speed limit is still what it was a mile back, where the houses sat closer together and a few restaurants and other businesses filled in the lots in between. But just about everyone speeds up to forty-five once they turn the corner by the gas station and the road straightens out again. Bellamy himself tends to hit the gas at this particular stretch.

Not that he would even consider bringing that up now.

He just shrugs, and soon they pass another speed limit sign, and Clarke accelerates smoothly as the road inclines up. She still seems tense, though. Not up for conversation. And that's fine, because the right words are still forming in Bellamy's head, a question like bubbles on the surface of water that is just about to boil. 

The sun angling in from the left streaks Clarke's hair almost white, but despite the glare, and even in profile, he can still make out the particular Clarke-frown expression on her face. It's part put-upon pout and part confused scowl, and it scrunches her whole face together right around her eyes in a way he's started to find uniquely endearing. He knows the look well: it's how she reacts when she gets a question wrong on a test, or when she accidentally bites into an unpopped kernel of corn during their biweekly movie nights. Also how she tends to react to the headlines or any other glimpse of the news. For some reason, then, she’s still fixating on that car that passed them by. But then he’s still stuck, himself, on the way she keeps her shoulders straight and the smooth, easy movements of her wrists as she takes them around another bend, and how she called him up last night when he was just finishing up with the dishes, because she wanted to tell him about this article she was reading, and _you know what the problem with these big lenders is, Bellamy?_ It wasn’t funny, but he’d leaned his hip back against the counter edge and smiled. So he can’t blame her, if she’s a little fixated.

For a little while, the road winds up along the side of a hill, curves and climbs and dips, and he forces himself to stare down at the rushing white line that marks their lane, so that Clarke can’t call him out for staring.

Then the road drops down again and evens out, and the mountains fall a little further back, leaving instead endless uneven fields of grass and brush and multi-colored trees. Telephone poles follow along with them, while the intermittent houses keep their distance. Past the next still-far-off bend is the bridge and then—

“Again!”

Bellamy turns just in time to catch another car rushing past them in the opposite facing lane. He watches it glide out in front of them and then fall back into their lane again, a respectable distance ahead.

“Again,” Clarke repeats, this time with a growl of frustration. “It’s bad enough going _fifty-five_ on a road like that. It curves all over the place, _no_ shoulder, _no_ visibility—we’re not even in a passing zone right now, you know.”

If he didn’t like her so much, he’d probably think the way she said _you know_ sounded downright _prim_ . Especially because, of course, he _does_ know. He’s lived in this area his whole life, and he drives this particular road almost every day. He knows that the no-passing zone continues for a few miles yet, but that visibility in this stretch is good enough to chance it, if you’re reckless or impatient enough. And he knows that the twists and turns become, with practice, as easy to maneuver as a native language is to speak, and that there’s never much traffic, so it’s hard to resist zipping along where the road leads you.

That’s what it is, he thinks. She’s a stranger still to this landscape, a novice scholar of its details: she takes each turn, follows each build and hollow of the road’s rhythm with thought-out precision and undeniable care, but being her passenger is like listening to a foreign speaker sound out the syllables of a half-understood text. She has no instinct, so she defaults to official expectation. Because she isn’t a blind rule follower, not really, although when they first met, he thought she was a good girl of the traditional sort. By now he knows she’s deeply pragmatic and trusts her own reason and her own instincts, others’ directions or regulations be damned. Even a law, if ridiculous enough, or inconvenient enough, wouldn’t daunt her.

“It should really be forty-five anyway, at least back there. Who needs to be in such a hurry that they’d risk throwing themselves off the side of a mountain by going sixty on a road like _that_?”

She doesn’t care, Bellamy realizes, that the other driver was speeding. She cares that he pegged her for a tourist, and that he isn’t entirely wrong.

Someday she’ll move on from here, anyway. This is a way station for her, one of her life's commas, the site of a setback from which she will one day recover and flee. But maybe when that happens, he'll leave too. Maybe they'll leave together, and settle somewhere urban and busy and tall, somewhere up North or out West, with new seasons and new people and a different angle of the sun. He'll take what he's been building, in his slow and steady way—his accumulated credits, his haphazard resume, his perseverance—and let it lead him to some great revelation, some deeper meaning and ambition. A focus point for his rambling curiosity and his expansive desire and his unnameable need.

Clarke almost had that all figured out once. She's told him. She was a studious, determined student; she had lists and goals and an arduous but well thought-out and clearly delineated path and she was following it with pre-made precision. Then the path crumbled up and she veered off and now the way forward is so much less clear. _Now it's like one foot in front of the other some days and that's all I know_ , she admitted to him once. Which is funny, because that's exactly how he feels.

So maybe they're not too different after all. Maybe the confidence he has in her is confidence he should have in himself.

"Right? Bellamy?"

_Right?_

Clarke's looking at him, shooting glances at him between watching the road, her fingers curled around the steering wheel but the heels of her hands raised, like she won't be able to let go of this posture of suspense until he agrees, until the unanswered, unheard question in the air between them is resolved.

"Right," he answers. "Exactly."

Clarke nods, and lets the tension fall out of her shoulders and hands. They've passed the bridge by now. They're almost home.

She doesn't say anything more for the rest of the drive, and if she notices Bellamy watching her, she gives no sign.

When she finally pulls up into his driveway and cuts the gas, Bellamy unbuckles his seat belt but doesn't immediately move to get out. They both sit back in their seats like they have no intention of parting. Somehow, he feels like she already knows exactly what’s on his mind, like his own sense of clarity is shining through him, bright enough for her to see.

He puts his hand on the door handle anyway, like he might still let this moment go, then turns back to her abruptly, too fast to overthink. It’s reckless, perhaps, but he trusts his instincts. He’s just going to floor it and _go_.

“Clarke—do you want to go out sometime?”

She turns to look at him, tilts her head, a half second’s startled surprise crossing her face before she starts to smile.

“Like, on a date?” he clarifies.

It’s only a moment, this uncertainty, and barely uncertainty at all as her smile widens across her face, but still his pulse pounds hard in his throat, until—

“Bellamy,” she answers, and touches her hand to his hand, “I thought you’d never ask.”


End file.
